The Broken Teaglass

This past spring, I was passed a debut novel from an editor at Delacorte Press, asking if I’d read it. It’s called The Broken Teaglass, by Emily Arsenault. It’s an interesting novel, set in a dictionary company, with a mystery hidden in the files of word citations, buried there for others to find by a Mysterious Someone. It was totally my kind of mystery, words and putting together a story like pieces of a puzzle, and so I enthusiastically blurbed the book, like this:

“Charming and witty are not the usual adjectives used to describe a mystery novel, but in the case of Emily Arsenault’s debut, all expectations and definitions must be relinquished. Not since A. S. Byatt’s Possession have I come across such a fascinating secret history as the one hidden within the pages of The Broken Teaglass and the ones we all carry inside us.”

This past Sunday, a reviewer at the New York Times seems to have felt the same way: